speedometers - eviltoast
  • atomicorange@lemmy.worldEnglish
    791·
    6 months ago

    A thermometer is like if we measured speed by crashing a car into a barrier and gauging how much it made the barrier shake.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    54·
    6 months ago

    When I was in elementary school, one of my classmates pronounced it “thermo meter” and I had to watch the science teacher struggle for a good 30 seconds to decide if he was going to correct him or not.

    • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
      44·
      6 months ago

      For anyone confused.

      Most other languages do call it a thermo meter or similar. People who are not native English speakers will pronounce it wrongly when speaking English, because the word is the same - it’s just pronounced weirdly in both British and American English. The British and American pronunciations are not exactly the same on this, but they’re both wrong different from any other languages, except Greek.

      The English pronunciation is caused by English inheriting the Greek way of stressing the third last syllable on words of Greek origin. It makes no sense in my mind why they do it on compound words though. Meter is not Greek. It’s English, so they could’ve chosen differently, but they obviously chose the most annoying way to pronounce it.

      There’s a few other words like that, but I don’t remember which…

        • ramble81@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          Isn’t it usually the other way around? Pedos getting in…. You know what, never mind.

  • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    6 months ago

    As we’re both Trekkies, I tell my spouse who likes it warmer all the time that they’re exposing us to unnecessary radiation leaks.

  • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.orgEnglish
    11·
    6 months ago

    Hmmm, he says, reveling in his pedantry: Speedometers actually measure net displacement, and since thermal energy causes collisions on the small scale, but results in very little net movement for the particles, its not quite like a speedometer.

    I like to think of it as a ball pit with one of those super bounce ball stacks in it.

  • witty_username@feddit.nlEnglish
    8·
    6 months ago

    Wouldn’t it be speed and crowding simultaneously?
    Also, where would infrared photons fit in this scenario?

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    6 months ago

    By that logic:

    Officer, I couldn’t have been speeding, the average speed of all the cars was below the speed limit!

  • ParabolicMotion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    6 months ago

    PV=nRT, or T=(PV)/(nR) You know, with gasses, temperature can be examined with respect to many factors.

    I speak of gasses as many of us are just fartin’ around on Lemmy. Pressure I tell you. We’ve all just spent the day under a lot of pressure, or should I say…gasses?

  • Zachariah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    6 months ago

    I’ve heard this, but then I asked once what speed water molecules in a room temperature glass of water would be going. Are they like walking, driving, flying in a jet, or much faster? I was told my question didn’t have an answer since it didn’t really work that way or something.

    I often wondered if the person answering just wasn’t able to make some assumption needed to answer because I didn’t state it in the question, or if saying thermometers measure speed is just wrong.

    • L3mmyW1nks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      6 months ago

      See figure 3 here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_temperature

      As mentioned above, there are other ways molecules can jiggle besides the three translational degrees of freedom that imbue substances with their kinetic temperature. As can be seen in the animation at right, molecules are complex objects; they are a population of atoms and thermal agitation can strain their internal chemical bonds in three different ways: via rotation, bond length, and bond angle movements; these are all types of internal degrees of freedom.

      tl;dr Water be jiggly. Amount of jiggle is hard to put a number on

      • davidgro@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        It would still be possible to answer the speed question, you just get different answers for different substances (and even phases of the same substance) at the same temperature.

        Since something like water does have those additional ways to store energy, my guess is it would be slower at room temp than another liquid with less complex molecules that have about the same mass each. (If there is such a thing)

        Also I expect different answers for each of mean, median, and mode speeds.

      • Zachariah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        So if I were jiggling, I think I could come up with a speed. I’d figure out how far I’m moving, and how long it takes me to move. So I could measure from far left to far right of the jiggle (let’s say 18in.) and then how far to go from far left to far right and return to the original position. If that’s 2 seconds, then that’s 1½ feet per 2 seconds which can be converted to any other speed such as km/hr.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              6 months ago

              The answer by the thermometer is the temperature, which is based on more degrees of freedom. You’ll have to define some mapping between the other degrees and velocity.

        • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          Here’s an experiment that you could try at home:

          Takes 2 cups of water of equal volume, one hot and one cold. Put a single drop of food coloring into each cup and time how long it takes for the color to fully disperse throughout the water.

          Record your units in SI units like cm or mm, because inches are stupid and scientists have agreed to not like them. You are a scientist now, so you must join the club.

          Submit your findings to the journal of Lemmy for peer review. Extrapolate into other forms of measurement if you want.

          If you want it to be even better, measure 3 temperatures (in °C, mind you): room temp, hot, and cold. Then you can plot them on a curve of distance vs time.